Last April 21, I had the opportunity to briefly share with the congregation a report of ministry highlights since the previous Church in Conference in November. I am posting those observations here on my blog this week.
Staff Restructuring
We have been in the process of staff changes and restructuring for several months. Three of our pastoral staff members are no longer on staff at Calvary. This has happened in less than a year's time. Each of these have stepped away from his responsibilities for very different reasons. During this time also, Calvary called Chad Mason to fill the Pastor for Mobilization and Global Impact vacancy. We are very grateful for this addition to the team. From the eight full-time pastoral positions that existed recently, five of them are filled now. That means that Pastors Rolando, Susan, Marcus and Chad are carrying additional responsibilities and they are doing so with enthusiasm and joy. I am very grateful for them. Additionally, James McGinnis has been given additional responsibilities. We also count on the full-time associate help of Jared Solis and the part-time interim help of Mario Samaniego and Andy Muskrat. (As I shared with you in the previous blog post, Andy will only be helping us through the end of May). We are functioning with a leaner staff structure and learning how to do more with less.
More importantly, we have developed a stronger team concept as pastoral staff and, while we each have specific responsibilities, we want to be servants to the entire congregation. We are now working in three primary teams. Rolando Aguirre leads the Discipleship Team. Chad Mason leads the Missions Team. The Music & Worship Pastoral team leadership is vacant. I lead the administration team now. This new team dynamic is developing well.
Integration and Identity
One of the issues that had been identified last year was how to grow in being one-church of two languages and various worship styles while maintaining the individual identities of the ministries. There has been significant steps taken in this direction. Susan Sosebee and Marcus Rodriguez continue to find ways for the integration of children and students into one discipleship process. Mark Richardson worked closely with Chuck Olson, Brandi Gatlin, Jared Solis and Benjamin Aguirre to produce Christmas and Easter musicals that involved the adult English-language choir, the adult Spanish-language choir and the children's choir. These worship expressions brought the strengths of each of these groupings together and produced something beautiful in English for our English-language congregation and in Spanish for our Spanish-language congregation. This exemplifies what the body of Christ at Calvary can be.
New Initiatives
One of the new initiatives that has brought new vibrancy to our church is the revitalizing of the WIT ministry. Jeanette Ahlenius has inclusively enlisted a power leadership team of ladies from our church who represent the rich diversity of our congregation. They have held several events with remarkable participation by many of the ladies in our church. They have developed various communication means to help ladies connect to the ministry and the church. One of these is their newly-launched WIT of Calvary Baptist Church facebook page: WIT of Calvary Facebook Page. WIT is working with the paradigm of doing English-only events where they invite women from all three services, occasionally doing events together with WIT en español, and also promoting some of the WIT Spanish-only events which are open to anyone interested. This paradigm of work maintains individual ministry identity while creating synergy in a spirit of cooperation. We are grateful for how WIT is modeling this for some of the other ministries.
In the months ahead our new area of focus will be the Adult Bible Fellowships. We believe that this mid-size group strategy is key to developing community, making disciples, and mobilizing them for the mission. As Pastor Rolando leads the discipleship team and as Pastor Chad leads the ABF ministry, they will seek alignment of strategy across the English-language and Spanish-language ministries and integration between disciple-making and missions mobilization. In the mean time the EQUIP and "Instituto de Capacitación Calvary" which are our Wednesday night components will be further aligned to provide leadership development for our ABF ministry.
The Perspectives of the World Christian Movement course is one that we have promoted as part of our discipleship/mobilization strategy since last fall. Although this class was offered off-campus several of our members took the course. Every single person who has taken it from Calvary has brought back very positive reports. In order to make this class more accessible to our people, this coming fall we are offering on our church campus. It will still be open to people from other churches but we will highly encourage it for our leaders. In fact, the pastoral staff is planning to go through the course together this fall. Look for more information about this coming up.
Mission mobilization
As Pastor Chad has engaged the Calvary ministry these last three months or so, several developments have taken place. We continue to affirm the "relief" ministries that Calvary supports but we will intentionally move to have a higher "development" focus. This terms may be better understood after reading the book When Helping Hurts but, in essence, it is the difference between "handouts" and "hand-up," between giving people emergency help and helping people become the best God wants them to become.
Another area where we will be working to bring a healthier balance is between our focus on the "unreached" and "relief/development" ministries. We believe that the gospel should be taken holistically to people around the world, caring for their human needs and helping them to become disciples of Jesus. At this time we are doing very good things in meeting human needs and in evangelism but much of what we do is in "reached" areas of the world. A "reached" area is where people have access to the gospel because there is a church in their own context. "Unreached people groups" are groups where there is no church and no access to the gospel in their own language or culture. We need to increase our involvement with the unreached.
This year our church is planning to officially sponsor trips to Chiapas in August, to the Amazon Basin in December, and, God-willing, to China in the Spring of 2014. In Chiapas and the Amazon Basin we are working with church planting and leadership development among indigenous people groups. The nature of the China trip will be shared by other means that will not be easily accessible on the internet like this blog.
There are, of course, multiple mission trips in which members of our church will be engaging this year as they pursue their passion and call. Our college students are a great example of this. This Sunday we are commissioning Rossy Pequeño who will be going to Germany and then will serve in a student ministry in Dallas, Sergio Burnias who will be serving in Boston, Anahí Velasquez who will be serving in Spain, and Suheily Maldonado who will be doing a two-year term of service in India through the IMB (International Mission Board of the Souther Baptist Convention). These are fruits of our collaboration with the Baptist Student Ministry at UTPA.
I also shared with the congregation about a couple in our church who has recently felt led to visit Central Asia to develop connections for the future mobilization of Spanish-speakers into that area. This is sensitive information but exciting. God is doing great things in our midst, through us and around us. Let's make sure we don't miss what He is up to these days!
These are some of the highlights in ministry at Calvary over the last few months and the next few months. Please keep praying, encourage those you lead to pray, support and engage in the ministry God has so graciously given us at Calvary. We are blessed with a wonderful congregation. This is a good day to be a part of Calvary.
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